The exact numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s hard to believe China is successfully hiding millions, or even hundreds of thousands, of covid deaths from the world. I could easily believe the actual death toll is ten times what the CCP claims. I don’t think it at all likely that it’s a hundred times…

Depending on your interests, you could potentially go a lifetime without baking anything that requires real vanilla. Any time you’re making something where vanilla is the main flavor you should use the real stuff, but for something like chocolate chip cookies where it’s a secondary flavor the difference is barely…

The point is that even doing a smaller scale version of the same thing isn’t viable for the overwhelming majority of authors.

You’re gonna have to explain what, exactly, the difference between an “incarceration facility” and a prison is. It sounds to me like you want to replace the current prison system with a different one. Which is a perfectly laudable goal, but not one that can be reasonably be described as “abolish prisons”.

The big limitation on OGL is trademarks—as you say, you can’t release a book called the Monster Manual. You can’t use certain monsters and most named NPCs. And you can’t use certain fonts associated with the official branding. Assuming those follow those rules, the fact that their idea is both ambitious and stupid…

Stuff not loading in time when you’re moving too fast isn’t a “technical hiccup with the new engine.” It’s a fundamental limitation that every open world game needs to balance against. The more stuff you’re loading in memory the more time you need to load it, and thus the slower you have to limit players’ top speed.

Let me put it this way: studios that use Unreal generally prominently mention that fact in recruiting emails, because it’s dramatically more pleasant to work in than most in-house engines. It’s not a magic bullet, and high graphical fidelity always comes with a lot of work, but there are a lot of time saving features…

China is on track to be a cleaner society, per capita, than the U.S. But they also have a whole lot of people adapting a wealthier, more energy-intense lifestyle, and that’s outweighing the impact of their investments in green energy.

It’s orders of magnitude more expensive to store a ton of carbon than it is to prevent a ton of carbon emissions by, say, replacing some coal power with some wind power. And that’s not gonna change any time soon.

Carbon capture will probably eventually need to be part of the solution, and it certainly deserves research…

Yeah, we’re past the point of avoiding bad things happening and rapidly approaching the deadline to stop very bad things from happening, but there are many, many layers of even worse outcomes that can still be avoided.

Not really, no.

I don’t think so. Pretty sure it’s just her mother’s side.

So the concept of different people expressing affection in different ways, and needing it expressed to them in different ways, is a valuable one. But I’m pretty sure there are as many “love languages” as there are people, and attempts to turn them into a discrete list, whether that be five items long or seven, is just…

But Garm Bel-Iblis was a general, not an admiral (though good luck figuring out what the difference means).

Some prescriptivist grammarians say that “themself” is wrong, and you should always use “themselves”. But “themself” has been used for centuries, is being used with increasing frequency in regards to non-binary individuals, and feels vastly more natural to my ear.

Any time you reuse a green letter you’re gaining zero extra information. Unless there’s a good chance you’re gonna guess the correct word, that’s a sub-optimal choice.

Yes, it absolutely is, though to some extent it’s an industry wide trend. Respawn just did a similar soft-announcement, probably also to help with recruitment.

1. Technically that was Tarkin, though Vader was definitely complicit.

The Death Star was about as unambiguously a legitimate target of war as you can possibly get. It’s really, really not comparable to deliberately wiping out a village.

The only game I can think of where you’d care about having 240 FPS and you have a chance in hell of hitting it at 4k is CS:GO. But for most people, I think it’s about having the option of 4k, or turn down the resolution and get a super high framerate.

The only game I can think of where you’d care about having 240 FPS and you have a chance in hell of hitting it at 4k…